Scandal Wears Satin by Loretta Chase

interferers, and make sure I don’t trip over them—or they don’t get killed accidentally?”
    That had certainly added interest and excitement to what could have been a mundane mill.
    “You can’t think I’d hang about the shop when you’d given me a perfect excuse to make a hasty exit,” she said. “And then another fine excuse to cancel the order for that ugly dress. Really, it couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it.”
    “What’re you saying, Miss?” Fenwick piped up from the back. “We went to all this bother, and I nearly got drug to the workhouse—and you didn’t even want a bleedin’ dress?”
    “She’s the tricky sort,” Longmore said. “You said so yourself, as I recall.”
    The street being less chaotic than those they’d traveled previously, he was able to give her more than a cursory glance. She was completely disheveled, her ugly cap hanging crookedly from one side of her head, her stringy hair falling down in back and clinging stickily to her forehead and cheeks. And her bodice was hanging loose.
    “Your clothes are falling off,” he said.
    “Oh,” she said. She reached under the cloak to refasten her dress. After a moment’s struggle, she muttered under her breath. It sounded like street French.
    More audibly she said, “That fool woman missed a hook. I don’t know what she’s done, but I can’t get the wretched thing undone. Fenwick, you’d better unhook it for me.”
    “Not on your life,” the boy said. “There’s things I’ll do and things I won’t and getting tangled in females’ personal hooks and buttons and such is where I draw the line.”
    “Don’t be so missish,” said Sophy. “You can’t expect Lord Longmore to stop the horses and do me up.”
    “Better him than me,” Fenwick said. “I won’t touch them things with a pitchfork.”
    “Coward,” Longmore said. The day simply kept getting better and better.
    He turned into the nearest side street, and halted the carriage. He sent Fenwick down to hold the horses’ heads. Then he faced Sophy.
    “Turn sideways,” he said. “I’m not an acrobat.”
    She unfastened the cloak and shrugged it from her shoulders. It slid down to her waist. Then she turned and lifted her hair out of the way. She bent her head.
    And he became aware of the air changing, humming with tension.
    Her neck lay bare before him. Smooth, perfectly creamy skin, and a trace of golden down where the hairline tapered off.
    He could almost taste her skin. His head bent, and all he could think of was licking the back of her neck the way a cat licked cream.
    “You were brilliant in the shop, by the way,” she said.
    “You told me to be myself,” he said, his voice thick. He could smell her skin, tinged with lavender and . . . pine?
    He could barely focus on the hooks. He stared at her soft neck.
    “I think it’s somewhere in the middle,” she said.
    “What is?”
    “The hook she fastened to the wrong bar. It’s a stitched bar, you see? Not a metal eye.”
    He hauled his attention to the dress. The fabric was bunched up near the middle of her back. Above the place where the dress was crookedly fastened, a small gap had opened. He could see a bit of undergarment. Fine muslin. Embroidered. With tiny flowers.
    He swallowed a groan.
    “You got right into the spirit of the thing,” she said. “You were brilliant.”
    He cleared his throat. “I was being myself.”
    He told himself not to rush his fences.
    He wasn’t easy to persuade. Resisting temptation had never made any sense to him. But there was nothing to be gained by giving in now, in a public byway. Even a dolt like the Earl of Longmore could understand that.
    Do the job and be done with it , he told himself.
    Certainly it was no onerous task. He was used to doing and undoing women’s clothing. He’d done it wearing gloves, more than once. He’d done it in the dark. He’d done it at speeds that might be records for the Northern Hemisphere, while the